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1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England. During that year, Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Every Tongue Got to Confess is an extensive volume of African American folklore that Zora Neale Hurston collected on her travels through the Gulf States in the late 1920s. The bittersweet and often hilarious tale, which range from longer narratives about God, the Devil, white folk, and mistaken identity to witty one-liners, reveal attitudes about faith, love, family, slavery, race, and community.

In President Me, Carolla shares his vision for a different, better America free from big issues like big government down to small problems like hotel alarm clock placement. Running on an anti-narcissism platform, President Carolla calls for a return to the values of an earlier time when stew and casserole were on every dinner table and there were no “service dogs” on airplanes. President Me hits right at the heart of what makes our country really annoying, and offers a plan to make all of our lives, but mostly Adam’s, much better.

On a summer's day in 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church College in Oxford, Charles Dodgson, a lecturer in mathematics, photographed six-year-old Alice Liddell, the daughter of the college dean, with a Thomas Ottewill Registered Double Folding camera, recently purchased in London. Simon Winchester deftly uses the resulting image - as unsettling as it is famous, and the subject of bottomless speculation - as the vehicle for a brief excursion behind the lens, a focal point on the origins of a classic work of English literature.

The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America’s history - Marvel Comics - and the outsized personalities who made Marvel, including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby.

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times best seller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above all others. In an age defined by hyper-connectivity and constant stimulation, Francine Prose makes a compelling case for the solitary act of reading and the great enjoyment it brings. Inspiring and illuminating, What to Read and Why includes selections culled from Prose’s previous essays, reviews, and introductions.

In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.

From the elections of Barack Obama and Donald Trump to the tragic events of Ferguson and Charlottesville, the subject of race has come to the forefront of American consciousness. Legendary satirist D. L. Hughley offers his own cutting observations on this contentious issue that continues to traumatize the nation, a wound made more painful by the ongoing comments and actions of the 45th president. Hughley uses humor to draw attention to injustice, sardonically offering advice on a number of lessons, like "How to make cops feel more comfortable while they're handcuffing you".

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary.

"Why do we write?" With this question Joyce Carol Oates, in this new collection of seminal essays and criticism, begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer's inspiration - do subjects haunt those who might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something "happen" to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer's best work?

Before Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jonathan Lethem became revered authors, they were readers. In this ebullient book, America’s favorite librarian Nancy Pearl and noted-playwright Jeff Schwager interview a diverse range of America's most notable and influential writers about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark. The Writer’s Library is a revelatory exploration of the studies, libraries, and bookstores of today’s favorite authors.

Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories - stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence. Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It’s about the stories we still blindly cling to, and the ones that cling to us: the origin tales, the guiding myths, the religious parables, the literature and films and fairy tales passed down....

People love and remember the novels of Bobbie Ann Mason because they ring so true. This dazzling memoir has the same power. In it, Mason tells the story of her own family - a multilayered saga of three generations, their aspirations, their conflicts, and the ties that bound them to one another.

The New York Times best-selling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media.

First published in 1986 and updated several times since, Don’t Panic is in an in-depth exploration of Douglas Adams’s cultural phenomenon The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - from its beginnings as a UK radio series, to its expansion into a wildly popular book trilogy, and onto incarnations in various media including stage, records, film, computer games, and even, um, tea towels.

Filled with the twists, pathos, and unusual characters that sprang from this novelist’s extraordinary imagination, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer’s death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, he seeks to understand Dickens’ creative genius and enduring popularity. Following his life from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens’ fiction drew from his life - a fact he acknowledged.

In Screen Tests, an astoundingly original and stylish collection, Zambreno has once again created new categories of writing, of vivid and surprising language and thought.

The Constitution is the most significant document in America. But do you fully understand what this valuable document means to you? In How to Read the Constitution - and Why, legal expert and educator Kimberly Wehle spells out in clear, simple, and common-sense terms what is in the Constitution and most importantly, what it means. In compelling terms and including text from the United States Constitution, she describes how the Constitution’s protections are eroding.

A pause-resisting, existential romp through the life and times of the world’s most polarizing punctuation mark. Through her rollicking biography of the semicolon, Watson writes a guide to grammar that explains why we don’t need guides at all and refocuses our attention on the deepest, most primary value of language: true communication.